Marketing expert named TiVo and Kindle

By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN The New York Times

Sunday

Jan 6, 2013 at 12:01 AM

Michael Cronan, a San Francisco-based graphic designer and marketing executive who placed his stamp on popular culture when he created the brand names TiVo and Kindle, died Tuesday in Berkeley, Calif. He was 61.

The cause was colon cancer, said his wife, Karin Hibma, with whom he founded the marketing firm Cronan in the early 1980s.

Cronan, who studied art in college, had many corporations and cultural institutions as clients, but he was most remembered for the pair of brand names he came up with a decade apart.

In the spring of 1997, he was asked to forge a name and an identity for a new device, a digital video recorder developed by a company called Teleworld that offered more sophisticated television recording choices than the videocassette recorder.

"We reviewed probably 1,600-plus name alternatives, seriously considered over 800 names and presented over 100 strong candidates to the team," Cronan told Matt Haughey for his blog PVR (the letters stand for personal video recorder) in 2005.

"We spent the early meetings trying to place a cultural context on the product," he said. Among the possibilities were Bongo and Lasso, which never got far.

Believing that "we were naming the next TV," Cronan recalled, "I thought it should be as close as possible to what people would find familiar, so it must contain T and V."

"I started looking at letter combinations," he added, "and pretty quickly settled on TiVo." (The "Vo" portion, he said, had a connection to the Latin and Italian words for vocal sound and voice.)

When Amazon prepared to introduce its first electronic reader in 2007, it turned to Cronan, who envisioned imagery reflecting the reading experience as an embryonic but rising technology.

Hibma said in an interview Friday that in pondering a brand name, Cronan "wanted to create something small, humble, with no braggadocio," while choosing an image that "was about starting something, giving birth to something."

He found the name, she said, by likening use of the new e-reader to "starting a fire."

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